Chapter I: COPY in substance, and sometimes verbatim, the account written in (2)

This led to her account of a “queer fright” she had had at midnight, or thereabouts. Awakened from her first sound sleep by the unaccountable thrill of alarm each of us has felt, in the impression that some one or something that has no right to be there, is in the darkened chamber, she lay still with beating heart and listened for further proof of the intrusion. In a few minutes she heard a faint rustle that ran from the farthest window toward her bed, and passed to the door leading into the hall. Thoroughly startled, she shook my father’s shoulder and whispered to him that there was some one in the room. He sprang up, lighted the gas, and made a thorough search of the chamber and the dressing-room. The door was locked, and, besides themselves, there was no occupant of the apartment. He had fallen asleep again, when she heard the same rustling noise, louder and more definite than before. There was no mistaking the direction of the movement. It began at the window, swept by the bed, and was lost at the door. The terrified wife again awoke her husband, and he made the round a second time, with the same result as before.

When the mysterious movement seemed to brush her at the third coming, she aroused her companion in an agony of nervousness:

“I am terribly ashamed of my foolishness,” she told him, shivering with nameless fears; “but there really is something here, now!” He was, as I have said in a former part of my true story, usually so intolerant of nervous whimsies that we forbore to express them in his hearing. He had mellowed and sweetened marvellously within the last few years, as rare vintages are sure to ripen. Arising now, with a good-humored laugh, he made a third exploration of the premises, and with no better result. When he lay down again, he put his hand affectionately upon my mother’s arm with a soothing word:

“I will hold _you_ fast! You are the most precious thing in the house. Neither burglar nor bogie shall get you.”

“What was it?” we asked.

“Oh, probably the wind blowing the shade, or making free with something else that was loose. It was a stormy night. We agreed, this morning, that it must have been that.”

She spoke carelessly, and we took the incident as little to heart. Passing through the hall, awhile later, I espied my maid Ellen, who had lived with me for five years, whispering with a mulatto woman in a corner. They fell apart at seeing me, and Ellen followed me to the sitting-room.

“Rhoda was saying that the colored people think what happened last night was a warnin’,” she observed, with affected lightness. “They are awful superstitious, ma’am, ain’t they?”

“Very superstitious and very ignorant!” I returned, severely.

The trifling episode was gone, like a vapor passing from a mirror, before my brother Herbert appeared. He had arisen at daybreak, driven to Petersburg, and taken there the train to Richmond, arriving by nine o’clock.

At the same hour our father reached his office. I have heard the story of his walk down-town so minutely described that I can trace each step. It was more than a mile from his house to the office. There were no street-cars or omnibuses in the city, at that time. Sometimes he drove to his place of business; sometimes he rode on horseback. Generally, he chose to walk. He was a fine horseman and a fearless driver, from his youth up. At sixty-eight he carried himself as erect as at thirty, and made less of tramping miles in all weathers than men of half his age thought of pacing a dozen squares on a sunny day. As he had reminded his wife, in excusing his hurried breakfast, there were errands, many and important, to be looked after. He stopped at Pizzini’s, the noted confectioner of the town, to interview that dignitary in person, anent a cake of noble proportions and brave with ornate icing—Christmas fruit-cake—of Pizzini’s own composition, for which the order was given a week ago. To the man of sweets he said that nothing must hinder the delivery of the cake beyond that evening.

“We are planning a royal, old-fashioned family Christmas,” he subjoined, “and there must be no disappointments.”

The evergreens were ordered as stringently. Two cart-loads, as he had said, and two more Christmas-trees, in case one was not satisfactory. “There must be no disappointments.”

Not far from Pizzini’s he met Doctor Haxall, also “Christmasing.” The two silver-haired men shook hands, standing in the damp snow on the corner, and exchanged the compliments of the season.

“What has come to you?” queried the doctor, eying his friend curiously. “You are renewing your youth. You have the color, the step, and the eyes of a boy!”

“Doctor!” letting his hand drop upon the other’s shoulder, “to-morrow will be the happiest day of my life! After four terrible years of war and separation, I am to have in the old home all my children and grandchildren—a united and loving family. It will be the first time in eight years! My cup runneth over!”

He strode into his office with the springing step that had brought him all the long mile and a half; spoke cheerily to two or three employees who were on hand; remarked upon the weather, and his confidence that we would have a fine day to-morrow, and laid aside his overcoat and hat. Then he stepped to the outer door to issue an order to two colored men standing there, began to speak, put his hand to his head, and fell forward. The men caught him, saved him from falling, and supported him to a chair. He pointed to the door, and spoke one word:

“Horace!”

My brother was his partner in business, and he could not be far away. The messenger met him within a short distance of the door. The dulling eyes brightened at sight of him; with an inarticulate murmur, the stricken man raised his hand to his head, to indicate the seat of pain, leaned back upon the strong young arms that held him, and closed his eyes.

He was still breathing when they brought him home. Doctor Haxall had galloped on ahead of the carriage containing him and the attendants, to prepare us measurably for what was coming. The unconscious master of the home was brought through the hall between banks of evergreens, delivered in obedience to his order issued but three hours earlier. Two tall Christmas-trees and three wagon-loads of running cedar, pine, and spruce heaped the floor, and were pushed aside hastily by the servants to make way for the mournful procession.

He did not speak or move after they laid him upon his own bed.

One more hour of anguished waiting, and we knew that he had entered upon the “happiest day of his life.”

XLIII

TWO BRIDALS—A BIRTH AND A PASSING—“MY LITTLE LOVE”—“DRIFTING OUT”—A NONPAREIL PARISH

IN October, 1867, I had the great happiness of seeing my favorite brother married to the woman he had loved so long and so faithfully that the marriage was the fitting and only sequel the romance of the Civil War could have. From the day of our coming to Newark, she, who was now my sister, then a school-girl, had established herself in our hearts. She was my sister Alice’s most intimate friend, and, after Alice left us, glided into the vacant place naturally. With the delicacy and discretion characteristic of a fine and noble nature, she never, during those dreary years of separation and silence, alluded, in her talks with me, to the tacit “understanding” existing between herself and my brother. When he visited us immediately upon his liberation from Fort Delaware, it was evident that both of the unacknowledged lovers took up the association where it had been severed four years ago.

They were wedded on October 5th. The next day Mr. (now “Doctor”) Terhune, the three little girls, and myself, with their nurse, took the train for Richmond to assist in the preparations for the marriage of Myrtle and “Will” Robertson. The newly wedded pair returned from their bridal tour in season to witness the second marriage, on October 17th.

On February 4, 1869, my little Myrtle opened her beautiful eyes upon the world in which she was to have an abiding-place for so short a time that the fast, bright months of her sojourn are as a dream to me at this distance from that spring and summer. She was a splendid baby, finely developed, perfect in feature, as in form, and grew so rapidly in size and strength that my fashionable friends pointed to her as a lively refutation of my theory that “bottle babies” were never so strong as those who had their natural nourishment. A tedious spell of intermittent fever that laid hold of me, when she was but two months old, deprived her of her rightful nutriment. When she was four months old, we removed for the summer to Sunnybank, and set aside one cow expressly for her use. She throve gloriously until, in September, dentition sapped her vitality, and, as I had dreaded might ensue upon the system of artificial feeding, none of the various substitutes for nature’s own provision for the young of the human race, were assimilated by the digestive organs. On the last day of the month she passed into safer hands than ours.

* * * * *

I have told the story of our Alice’s wonderful life in _My Little Love_. Now that my mind and nerves have regained a more healthful tone than they could claim during the months when I found a sad solace in the portraiture of our lost darling, I cannot trust myself to dwell at length upon the rich endowments of mind and heart that made the ten-year-old girl the idol of her home, and a favorite with playmates and acquaintances. Although thirty-five years have set that beautiful life among the things of a former generation, I still meet those who recollect and speak of her as one might of a round and perfect star.

We, her parents, knew her for what she was, while she was spared to glorify our home. Once and again, we congratulated ourselves that we comprehended the value of our treasure while we held it—did not wait for the brightening of the fleeting blessing. When He who bestowed the good and perfect gift recalled her to Himself, we thanked Him, from the sincere depths of broken hearts, that He had deemed us worthy to keep it for Him for almost eleven years.

She went from us January 1, 1874.

By the time the spring opened, repeated hemorrhages from lungs I had been vain enough to believe were exceptionally strong, had reduced me to a pitiable state of weakness.

If I have not spoken, at every stage of the narrative of these late years, of the unutterable goodness of Newark friends and parishioners, it is not that this had abated in degree, or weakened in quality. In all our afflictions they bore the part of comforters to whom our losses were theirs. Strong arms and hearts in our hours of weakness were ever at our call. When it became apparent that my health was seriously impaired, the “people,” with one voice, insisted that Doctor Terhune should take a vacation of uncertain length, and go with me to the Adirondacks for as long a time as might be needed to restore me to health and vigor.

I had worked hard for the past five or six years. Besides my literary engagements, which were many, including the arrangement of material for, and publication of, _Common Sense in the Household_, I was deep in church and charitable work, and had a large visiting-list. Little account was made, at that date, of nervous prostration. I should have laughed that little to scorn had it been intimated by physician or friend that I was a victim to the disorder. I know now, to a certainty, that I was so near the “verge” that a touch would have toppled me over. My very ignorance of the peril may have saved me from the fall.

We were four months in the Adirondacks. Except that the sore lungs drew in the resinous airs more freely than they had taken in the fog-laden salt air of the lowlands, and that I slept better, I could not discern any improvement in my condition when the shortening and cooling days called us southward.

In July, a telegram from Richmond had informed me of my mother’s death. So battered and worn was I that the full import of the tidings did not reach my mind and heart, until my brother Herbert sought in the balsam forests relief from the cares of home and parish, and we talked together of our common loss in the quiet woods fringing the lake. I shall never forget the strange chill that froze my heart during one of these talks, when I bethought myself that I now belonged to the “passing generation.” My mother’s going had struck down a barrier which kept off the cold blast from the boundless Sea of Eternity. I could not shake off the fancy for many weeks. It recurred to me in wakeful midnights, and in the enforced rest succeeding toilful days, until it threatened to become an obsession. Instead of accepting this and other, to me, novel and distressing sensations, as features of confirmed invalidism, I fought them with all the might of a will that was not used to submission.

The next winter was one of ceaseless conflict. I grew insanely sensitive on the subject of my failing health. When, after walking quickly up the stairs, or climbing the hill from the lower town to our home, a fit of coughing brought the blood to my lips, I stanched it with my handkerchief and kept the incident to myself. I went into a shop, or turned a corner, to avoid meeting any one who would be likely to question me as to my health, or remark upon my pallor. At home, the routine of work knew no break; I attended and presided at charitable and parish meetings, as if nervous prostration were a figment of the hypochondriacal imagination.

So well did I play the part to the members of my own household, that my husband himself believed me to be on the low, if not the high, road to recovery. He was as busy in his line as I pretended to be in mine, and certain projects affecting the future welfare of his parish were on foot, enlisting his lively interest. How far the pious deception may have gone, was not to be tested. The active intervention of one plain-spoken woman was the pivotal point of our two lives.

I mentioned, some chapters back, the call of one of my best friends and the best neighbor I ever had, on the day of Mr. Lincoln’s death. Although we had removed, by medical advice, to the higher part of the city, and a full mile away from her home, she never relaxed her neighborly kindness. I had not been aware of her close surveillance of myself; still less did I suspect at what conclusion she had arrived. She had reasons, cogent and sad, for surveillance and conclusions. Several members of her own family had died of consumption, and she was familiar with the indications of the Great White Plague. When she came, day after day, to take me to drive at noon, when, as she phrased it, “the world was properly aired,” and, when she could not come, sent carriage and coachman with the request that I would use the conveyance at pleasure—I was touched and a little amused at what was, I conceived, exaggerated solicitude for me, whose indisposition was only temporary. Meanwhile, her quick eyes and keen wits were busy. Not a change of color, not a flutter of the breath escaped her, and in the fulness of time she opened her mouth and spoke.

My husband had a habit, of many years’ standing, of winding up a busy, harassing day by dropping into the home of our whilom neighbors, and having a tranquillizing cigar with the husband. I never expected him home before midnight when he did this, and on one particular evening, knowing that he was at the B.’s, and feeling more than usually fatigued, I went to bed at ten. Awakened, by-and-by, by the glare of a gas-burner full in my face, I unclosed my eyes upon a visage so full of anxiety, so haggard with emotion, that I started up in alarm.

“Don’t be frightened!” he said, soothingly. “Nothing has happened. But, is it true that you are so ill as Mrs. B. would have me believe? And have I been blind?”

The energetic little lady had, as she confessed to me when I charged her with it, freed her burdened mind without reserve or fear:

“It was time somebody opened his eyes, and I felt myself called to do it.”

Within twenty-four hours a consultation of physicians was held.

They, too, made no secret of their verdict. The apex of the right lung was gone, and it was doubtful whether anything could prevent the rapid waste of both. When Doctor Terhune, ever a stanch believer in the efficacy of change of air and place, declared his determination to take me abroad, without the delay of a month, two of the Galens affirmed that it would be of no use. I “had not three months of life left to me, under the most favorable circumstances.”

The ghastly truth was withheld from me at the time. I was told that I must not spend another winter in Newark, and that we would, if possible, go to the south of Europe for the winter. “To go abroad” had been the dream of my life. Yet, under the anticipation of the labor and bustle of closing the house, perhaps breaking up our home for good, and going forth into a new world, my strength failed utterly. Now that my husband knew the worst, there was no more need of keeping up appearances. I became aware that I had, all along, been holding on to life with will-power that had no physical underpinning. Each day found me weaker and more spiritless. The idea that I was clinging to a shred of existence by a thinning thread, seized upon me like a nightmare. And I was tired! _tired!_ TIRED!

There came a day when I resolved to let go and drift out.

That was the way I put it to my husband when he approached my bed, from which I never arose until nine or ten o’clock, and inquired how I felt.

“I am worn out, holding on!” I informed him. “I shall not get up to-day. All that is needed to end the useless fight is to let go and drift out. I shall drift!”

He sat down on the side of the bed and looked at me. Not gloomily, but thoughtfully. There was not a suspicion of sentimentality in the gaze, or in the tone in which he remarked, reflectively:

“I appreciate fully what you mean, and how hard it is for you to keep on living. And I say nothing of the inconvenience it would cause your girls and myself were you to die. It is asking a great deal of you—” (bringing out the words slowly and with seeming reluctance). “But if you _could_ bring yourself to live until Bert is through college, it would be a great kindness all around. The boy will go to the devil without his mother. Think of it—won’t you? Just hold on until your boy is safely launched in life.”

With that he left me to “think of it.”

My boy! My baby! Just four years old, on my last birthday! The man-child, of whom I was wont to say proudly that he was the handsomest birthday gift I ever had, and that no young man could ever pay his mother a more delicate and gracious compliment than he had paid me in timing his advent upon December 21st. The baby that had Alice’s eyes and brunette coloring! I lay still, staring up at the ceiling, and doing the fastest thinking I had ever accomplished. I saw the motherless boy, sensitive and high-spirited, affectionate and clever, the butt of rude lads, and misinterpreted by brutish teachers; exposed to fiery temptations at school and in college, and yielding to them for the lack of a mother’s training and the ægis of a mother’s love.

“The boy will go to the devil without his mother!”

Hard words those, and curtly uttered, but they struck home as coaxings and arguments and pettings could not have done.

In half an hour my husband looked in upon me again. I intercepted remark or query by saying:

“Will you ring the bell for Rose to help me dress? I have made up my mind to hold on for a while longer.”

The tactful ruse had given me a new lease of life.

One more circumstance connected with our first foreign trip may be worth mentioning here.

During the summer of 1855, which I spent in Boston and the vicinity, I consulted Ossian Ashley with regard to a project that had engaged my mind for some months—_viz._, indulging my long-cherished desire to visit Europe, and to spend a year there. There was no reason, that I could see, why I should wait longer to put the plan into execution. My parents were living, and were in the prime of healthy maturity; I had plenty of money of my own, and, if I had not, my father would cheerfully defray the expenses of the trip. We discussed the scheme at length, and with growing zest. Then he made the proposition that his wife should accompany me, taking her boy and girl along (she had but two children then), and that he would join us in time to journey with us for a few months, and bring us home.

With this well-digested scheme in my mind, I returned to Richmond. There I met with strenuous opposition from an unexpected quarter:

“If you will stay at home and marry me, I guarantee to take you abroad within seven years,” was one of the few promises the speaker ever broke to me.

Just twenty-one years from the day in which Ossian Ashley and I blocked out the route his wife and I would take on the other side, I looked into his New York office to say that we had engaged passage for Liverpool for October 15th, and that we expected to be absent for two years at the least.

His look was something to be remembered. His son was in a Berlin University, and Mrs. Ashley and her two young daughters would sail on September 15th for Liverpool, intending to go thence to Germany. They would remain there for two years.

On the morrow, we had a letter from him, notifying us that they had exchanged the date of sailing for October 15th, and the boat for the _City of Berlin_, in which we were to sail.

“A trifling delay of twenty-one years!” observed my husband, philosophically. “If all human projects came as near prompt fulfilment as that, there would be fewer grumblers.”

We took with us our three children and my maid, who had been the boy’s nurse. In _Loiterings in Pleasant Paths_, written in part while we sojourned abroad, she figures as “The Invaluable.” Never was title more justly earned. In that book the events of the next two years are recorded at greater length than they could be set down here.

I made no note there of the pain that seemed to pluck out our heartstrings, consequent upon our parting with our Newark parish and fellow-citizens. We had grown with the place, which was a mere village, eighteen years ago, by comparison with the large city we left. Her interests were ours. Doctor Terhune was identified with her public and private enterprises, and known by sight and by reputation throughout the town and its environs. His church stubbornly refused to consider his resignation as final. He might have an indefinite leave of absence—two, four, six years—provided he would engage to come to them when he could bring me back well. He wisely refused to listen to the proposal. The business quarter of the thriving city was encroaching upon the neighborhood of the church. It was likely to be abandoned as “a residential locality” within a few years. In which event, the removal of building and congregation would be a necessity. The history of such changes in the character of sections of fast-enlarging cities is familiar to all urbanites. It was essential, in the opinion of the retiring incumbent, that the church should select another pastor speedily, if it would retain its integrity and identity.

The love and loyalty that had enveloped us, like a vitalizing atmosphere, for almost a score of winters and summers, wrapped us warmly to the last. There were public receptions and private house-parties, by the dozen, and

“Partings such as press
The life from out the heart,”—

and a gathering on the steamer on sailing-day that made us homesick in anticipation of the actual rending of ties that were living flesh and blood—and we were afloat.

As one of the leading men in the church shook my husband’s hand, in leaving the deck, he pressed into it an envelope. We were well down the bay when it was opened. It contained a supplementary letter of credit of three thousand dollars—the farewell gift of a few men whose names accompanied the token.

“Faithful to the end!” murmured the recipient, reading the short list through mists that thickened between his eyes and the paper. “Had ever another man such a parish?”

I answered “No!” then, emphatically.

My response would be the same to-day.

XLIV

TWO YEARS OVERSEAS—LIFE IN ROME AND GENEVA

THE main events of the two years spent abroad by our small family, including “The Invaluable,” as we soon came to call Rose O’Neill, are set down in _Loiterings in Pleasant Paths_, a chatty volume of travel and sojourn, published soon after our return to America. The private record of those two dozen months would far surpass the book in bulk. It will never be written except as it is stamped upon “the fleshly tables of the hearts” of those who lived and loved, studied, and revelled with us.

We had meant to pass the first winter in Paris, but the most beautiful city of the world was unfriendly to my sore and aching lung. After an experiment of six weeks, we broke camp and sped southward. Ten days in the fair Florence I was to learn in after years to love as a second home, repeated the doleful tale of fog, rain, and chill that pierced our bones.

An old Richmond friend, with whom I had had many a jolly frolic in my early girlhood, was now Reverend Doctor Taylor, a resident of Rome. After the exchange of several letters, we adopted his friendly advice that we should give the Eternal City a trial as the refuge we sought—so much less hopefully than at first, that I entreated my husband, on the rainy evening of our arrival in Rome, not to push inquiries further, but to let me go home, and die in comfort there.

Doctor Taylor had ordered rooms for us in a family hotel well spoken of by Americans, and was at the station to conduct us to our quarters.

I was deposited upon a sofa, when my wraps were removed, and lay there, fairly wearied out by the railway journey. The room was fireless and carpetless. I could feel the chill of the stone flooring and the bare walls through the blankets in which I was swathed by distressful Rose, who “guessed these Eyetalians hadn’t the first notion of what American comfort is!” Three long French casements afforded a full view of leaden, low-stooping skies and straight sheets of rain. When a fire of sticks, besmeared with resin, was coaxed into a spiteful flare, the smoke puffed as spitefully into the room, and drifted up to the ceiling twenty feet overhead. Invited by my ever-hospitable husband to seat himself near an apology for a cheery hearthstone—less pitiful to him after his ten years’ residence in Italy than to us, the new arrivals—our friend fell into social chat of ways and means. The carpet would be down to-morrow; the sun would shine to-morrow; I would be rested to-morrow.

He broke off with a genial laugh there, to impart a bit of information we were to prove true to the utmost during the next year:

“Everything is ‘_domano_’ with Italians. I think the babies are born with it in their mouths. One falls into the habit with mortifying ease.”

I am afraid I dozed for a few minutes, lulled by the patter of rain and the low-toned talk going on at the far (literally) side of the apartment. A lively visitor used to wonder if we “could see across it on cloudy days without an opera-glass.”

This was the next sentence that reached me:

“Thus far, we have met with discouragement. March is the most trying month to weak lungs in America. And ever since we landed in Liverpool we have had nothing but March weather. I think now we shall push on to Algiers”—glancing ruefully at the murky windows. “Upon one thing I am determined—to find a land where there is no March, as we know the month. For one year I want to secure that for my wife’s breathing apparatus.”

“I know of but one such region.” The answer was in the slight drawl natural to the George Taylor I used to know; the speaker stared sombrely into the peevish fire.

“And that?” interrogated the other, eagerly.

The drawl had now a nasal touch befitting the question:

“‘No chilling winds, no poisonous breath
Can reach that healthful shore!’”

“Heavens and earth, man! _That_ is just where I don’t want her to go yet! Nor for many a long year!”

The laugh I could not suppress helped to warm and brighten us all. Do any of us suspect how much we owe to the funny side of life?

Thus began my Roman winter. With “_domano_” came the sunshine and the carpet, and the first of the hundred drives in and about the storied city, that were to bring healing and vigor, such as even my optimistic husband had scarcely dared to anticipate. That I am alive upon this wonderful, beautiful earth at this good hour, I owe, under God, to those divine four months among the Seven Hills. Doctor Terhune had received the appointment to the Chaplaincy of the American Chapel in Rome before we left Paris. He decided to accept it within a week after our arrival in the Eternal City. It was a cosey corner for pastor and flock—that little church in Piazza Poli, belonging to an Italian Protestant corporation, and occupied by them for half of each Sunday, by American tourists and transient residents of Rome for the other half. All my memories of the wonderful and bewitching winter are happy. None have a gentler charm than those which renew the scenes of quiet Sunday forenoons when visitors from the dear home-land, who had never before looked upon the faces of their fellow-worshippers, gathered by common consent in the place “where prayer was wont to be made” in their own tongue. There were no strangers in the assembly that lingered in the tiny vestibule and blocked the aisle when the service was over. The spirit of mutual helpfulness spoke in eye and speech. It should not have been considered singular that those thus convened were, almost without exception, refined and educated, and so unlike the commonly accepted type of travelling American, that we often commented upon the fact in conferences with familiar friends. We felicitated ourselves that we caught the cream of the flow of tourists, that season.

“It is a breath of the dear old home-life!” said more than one attendant upon the simple services, where the congregation was kaleidoscopic in outward seeming, the same in spirit.

I cannot pass over this period of our foreign life without a tribute to one whose friendship and able co-operation in the work laid to Doctor Terhune’s hand, did more than any other one influence to make for him a home in Rome. Dr. Leroy M. Vernon, who subsequently became Dean of the University of Syracuse, in New York State, was the rarest combination of strength and gentleness I have ever seen. He had been for some years resident in Rome; was an enthusiastic archæologist and art-student, speaking Italian with fluency and grace, and thoroughly _au fait_ to the best literature of that tongue. From the beginning of their acquaintanceship, the two men fraternized heartily. In the ripening of liking into intimacy, they walked, rode, talked, and studied together. What the association was to the younger of the two, may be imagined by one who has had the privilege of close communion with a beloved comrade who held the key to the treasure-house one has longed all his life to enter.

“The winter in Italy with Vernon was worth more to me than a course in the Academy of Fine Arts, combined with ten years of archæological lectures from experts,” was the testimony of the survivor, twenty years later, when the news of the dean’s death was brought to us.

They loved each other tenderly to the end of mortal companionship.

Who can doubt that it has been renewed in the City where eager minds are never checked by physical weakness, and aspiration is identical with fulfilment?

In mid-May, when the Pincio put on its beautiful garments in the purple flowering of the Judas-trees, and the tawny Tiber rolled between hills of living green, we turned our backs upon what those marvellous months had wrought into our own familiar dwelling-place, and took our sad, reluctant way to Florence. Five weeks there were varied by excursions to Fiesole, Bologna, and Venice. Our next move was to Lucerne. Leaving the children in care of “The Invaluable,” we ran up to Heidelberg, joining there our kinspeople, the Ashleys, and travelling with them leisurely over mountain and through pass, until we brought up in Geneva.

We were hardly settled, as we supposed for the season, in the bright little town of Calvin and Voltaire, when a summons came from the American Chapel in Paris for Doctor Terhune’s services, pending the absence of the regular incumbent in America, whither he had been summoned by the illness of his mother. We had no thought that the separation of the head from our transplanted family would be a matter of even a few weeks, whereas it lasted for four months. There was visiting back and fro; a reunion at Christmas under the massive crowns of mistletoe, such as grow nowhere else—not even in the Britain of the Druids—and a memorable New-Year’s dinner at the Hôtel Metropole, arranged under American auspices, the chief pride of the feast being mince-pies, concocted by Yankee housewives, and misspelled among the French dishes on the gorgeously illuminated menus. In February, my eldest daughter and myself went to Paris for a fortnight—a tentative trip which proved beyond a question that the air of the city on the Seine was rank poison to the healing lungs. We hurried back to jolly, friendly Geneva, where I could walk five miles _per diem_ in air that was the very elixir of life to my system, physical, mental, and moral. Even the lusty winds from Mont Blanc, and the rough gales that lashed Lake Leman into yeasty ridges for a week at a time, wrought strength, instead of harm. That bodily strength grew apace was but one element in the fulness of content in which we basked throughout the eight months we spent in the lakeside city, behind which the Alps stood in sublime calmness that was in itself tonic and inspiration. We had a pleasant _appartement_ in the _Pension Magnenat_, directly upon the quay. From our drawing-room windows we looked across the lake upon the Juras, capped with snow, and made beautiful exceedingly all day long, by changeful lights and shadows, reflected in the waters in opaline, prismatic hues we had never seen surpassed, even in Italy.

The American colony in Geneva has a stable reputation for intelligence and good-breeding. One expects to find these in university towns abroad, as at home. It may not have been unusually delightful that winter. Perhaps climate and health combined with our peaceful domestic life, to incline us to be more than satisfied with our social environment. Certain it is that the circle of congenial associates, that had widened to take us in, as a part of a harmonious corporate whole, was, to our apprehension, ideally charming. Everybody had some specific work or pursuit to explain his, or her residence in Geneva. The younger men were in the university, or in preparation for it, with “coaches”; the girls were studying French, German, and Italian, or painting from nature under such instructors as Madame Vouga, whose renown as a painter of wild flowers was international. We matrons had a reading-class, enlivened by the membership of our daughters, that met weekly at the house of some one of the party. To it we brought our easels, boards, and paint-boxes, our embroidery, or other fancy-work. One of the girls read aloud for two hours—history, biography, or essay—and at five o’clock what had been read was discussed freely over afternoon tea. A club of young people of both sexes read German, alternately with Italian and French plays, on Wednesday night, in my _salon_, I playing chaperon at my embroidery-frame at a side-table, and admitted to the merry chat that went around with coffee and cake, when the reading was concluded. Some of the members of that informal “Club” have made their mark in the large outer world since that care-free, all-satisfying sojourn in what we forgot to call an alien land, so happily did we blend with the classic influences, lapping us about so softly that we were never conscious of the acclimating process.

The tall youth, who submitted meekly (or gallantly) to correction of lingual lapses in his rendering of Molière or Wallenstein or Ariosto, from the girl at his elbow—revenging himself by a brisk fire of badinage in honest English after the books were closed—is an eminent metropolitan lawyer, whose income runs up well into the tens of thousands; another, a Berlin graduate, is the dignified dean of a law school attached to an American university; another is a college professor; another, a Genevan graduate, is rising in fame and fortune in an English city; one, beloved by all, completed a brilliant course at Harvard, and when hope and life were in their prime, laid his noble head down for his last sleep in Mount Auburn. The gay girls are staid matrons and mothers now, with sons and daughters of their own, as old as themselves were in that far-off, care-free time.

I have written “care-free” twice upon one page, and because I can conjure up no other phrase that so aptly describes what that veritable arbor on the Hill Difficulty we call “Life,” was to me. Household cares were an unknown quantity in the well-conducted pension. Our breakfast of French rolls, coffee, tea, boiled eggs, honey, and, for the younger children, creamy milk, was brought to our _salon_ every morning. A substantial luncheon (the _déjeuner à la fourchette_) was served in the pension _salle à manger_ at one, and a dinner of six or seven courses, at seven. Our fellow-guests were, for the most part, unobjectionable; a fair proportion were agreeable and desirable acquaintances. About one-third were Americans; another third were English; the rest were Italians, Germans, Russians, and French. A table at one end of the room was assigned to English-speaking boarders, and we soon made up a pleasant clique that did not, however, exclude several foreigners. Thus we persisted in calling them to ourselves. There were excursions every few days to places of interest within easy reach. Coppet, the home and burial-place of Madame de Staël; the Villa Diodati, where Byron and Shelley lived and wrote; Ferney the château from which Voltaire wrote letters to the magnates of the world, and within the walls of which he entertained all the famous wits and many of the beauties of his stirring times; Chillon, immortalized by Bonnivard and the poem founded upon his captivity—were some of the memorable haunts with which frequent visits made us familiar.

Exercise was a luxury in the ozone-fraught air, fresh every morning, and work was the natural result of the abounding vitality thus engendered. In no other quarter of the globe have I found such sustained vigor of mental and physical forces as during our residence in Switzerland. I record the fact gratefully, and as a possible helpful suggestion to other sufferers from the overstimulating climate and prevalent energy of American life. Rome was a gracious rest; Geneva was upbuilding.

It was a positive wrench to the heartstrings to leave her in May, and take our course leisurely northward.

The summer was given, and happily, to England, our headquarters being, successively, the Isle of Wight, Leamington, and Brighton.

Late in September, we sailed for New York.

XLV

SUNNYBANK—A NEW ENGLAND PARISH—“MY BOYS”—TWO “STARRED” NAMES

WITH no more idea as to our permanent abiding-place than had the Father of the Faithful, when he turned his back upon Ur of the Chaldees, and his face toward a land he knew not of, “still journeying toward the south,” in obedience to daily marching orders—we sought, upon reaching our native shores, the one _pied-à-terre_ left to us on the continent.

Sunnybank had been left in charge of the gardener, who, with his comely English wife and four children, had now occupied the lodge at the gate of our domain for ten years. He was Pompton-born and bred, and so unromantic in sentiment and undemonstrative in demeanor, that we were not prepared to behold a triumphal wreath on the gate when we drove into the grounds. No human creature was visible until, winding through the grove that hides the house from the highway, we saw the whole family collected about the door. All were in holiday garb; wreaths of goldenrod hung in the windows, and above the porch was tacked a scroll with the word “WELCOME” wrought upon it in the same flowers. Yet more amazed were we when, as Doctor Terhune stepped from the carriage, Conrad knelt suddenly and embraced the knees of his employer, with an inarticulate shout of joy, tears raining down his tanned cheeks.

“Just like a scene in an English play!” commented Christine, afterward. “But not a bit like what one would expect in Pompton, New Jersey, U. S. A.”

The unexpectedness of it all, especially the involuntary outbreak in a man who had never seen a play in his life, and despised “foolishness” of whatsoever description, moved us to answering softness, and brought the first rush of home-gladness we had felt since landing. For, to be honest, I confess that none of us were as yet reconciled to exchanging the life we had luxuriated in for the past two years—full, rich, and varied—for a toilful routine of parish duties, we knew not where. Without confiding the weakness to the others, each of us, as we owned subsequently with a twinge of shame, had been wofully dashed in spirit by the circumstances attending our arrival. Clarence Ashley had met us upon the wharf, his mother and sisters being at their country-place; the day was unseasonably warm for late September, and New York was in its least attractive out-of-season dress and mood. The docks were dirty, and littered with trunks, crates, and boxes; the custom-house officers were slow, and most of them sulky. We parted on the wharf with a dear friend from Virginia, who had travelled with us for nearly a year, and had taken return passage in the same ship. She had a home to which to go. We felt like pilgrims and strangers in a foreign land. As the carriage into which we had packed ourselves threaded its way through the grimy purlieus of the lower city, I found myself saying over mentally the unpatriotic doggerel I used to declare was unworthy of any true American:

“The streets are narrow and the buildings mean—
Did I, or fancy, leave them broad and clean?”

Then, the fields and roads past which the train (yclept “an accommodation”) bumped and swung, were ragged and dusty; the hedge-rows were unkempt, the trees untrimmed. Fresh as we were from the verdure of English parks, the shaven lawns, and blossoming hedges that make a garden-spot of the tight little island we proudly recognized as our Old Home, the effect of that sultry afternoon was distinctly depressing. Our lakeside cottage, the one nook in all the broad land we could call “Home,” on this side of the water, was another disappointment. Mrs. Haycock and her girls had wrought zealously to make it comfortable, and even festive. The wee rooms (as they looked to us) were shining clean; flowers were set here and there, white curtains, white bedspreads, and bright brasses betokened loving solicitude for our welfare and contentment, and the good woman had ready a hot supper, enriched with such Pompton dainties as she knew we loved. “The Invaluable” bustled over luggage, and added finishing touches to bedrooms and nursery. I am sure she was the only one of the returned exiles who was really happy that night.

I am thus frank in relating our experiences, because I believe them to be identical with those of a majority of tourists, upon resuming home-habits in their native country. After excitement and novelty comes the ebb-tide of reaction for the bravest and the most loving. Home is home, but readjustment precedes real enjoyment of the old scenes and ways.

We were hardly settled in the nest before we paid a promised visit to Richmond. There were resident there, now, three families of the clan. My brother Horace and the noble wife with whom my intimacy continued unshadowed by a cloud of distrust until her death in 1894; my sister Myrtle, more my daughter than sister, her husband, and the boy who was my husband’s namesake; and Percy, the youngling of the brood, with a dainty little spouse and their first-born son—made up the group that welcomed us to dear old Richmond in early December.

To this was added, a week or so later, our eldest sister, who journeyed all the way from her Missouri home to join in the greetings to the whilom wanderers. We had one more Christmas-week together—the last that was to collect the unbroken band under one roof-tree. Then Mea went westward, and we took our way toward the north, leaving Christine to make her début in society under the auspices of her uncles and aunts, and where her mother had first tasted the pleasures of young-ladyhood.

It was, as I wrote to her, history repeating itself, and that I felt as if I had taken root again in my native soil, and was budding anew into a second springtime.

In May I wrote to the girl whose first winter “out” had, thanks to the affectionate adoption of uncles and aunts, fulfilled her rosiest dreams:

“Do you recollect that I quoted to you at our parting in
January, what a quaint old lady said to me in my girlhood:
‘My dear, you may be an angel some day! You will never be
young again. Therefore, make the most of youth.’

“I paraphrase her counsel now, and to you: Make the most of
your present freedom, for you are going to be a pastor’s
daughter again. As you know, your father has been preaching
hither and yon all winter, and has had four calls to as many
different churches: two in New Jersey, one in New Haven,
and, lastly, in Springfield, Massachusetts. For reasons
that seem good and sufficient to him, he has accepted the
last-named invitation, and he will enter upon the duties
connected therewith, this month.

“The ‘Old First’ is the most ancient church in Springfield,
if not the oldest in the Connecticut Valley. It has had
an honorable history, in more than two hundred years of
existence. If you have read Doctor Holland’s _Bay Path_, you
will recollect Mr. Moxon, the then pastor of this church.
Perhaps because I have read the book, and maybe because my
old Massachusetts grandmother (a Puritan of the Puritans,
and preciously uncomfortable to live with, she was!) talked
to me of the straitlaced notions, works, and ways of the
‘orthodox’ New-Englander, which she thought ‘blazed’ the
only road to heaven—I have an idea that we will find the
atmosphere of Springfield very different from any other in
which we have lived. If I am right, it will be a change even
from Presbyterian Richmond. However this may be, I counsel
you to enjoy the remaining weeks of your stay there to the
utmost.”

If I were called upon to describe what was the real “atmosphere” of the loveliest of New England towns, in which we lived for five busy years, I should say that it was “stratified,” and that in a fashion that puzzled us grievously up to the latest day of our sojourn. Public spirit of the best and most enlightened sort; refinement and taste in art and literature; social manners and usages that were metropolitan, and neighborliness which made the stranger and sojourner welcome and at ease—all this was “shot,” if I may so express it, with strata of bigotry; with stubborn convictions that the holders thereof were right, and the insignificant residue of the world utterly wrong, and with primitive modes of daily life and speech, that never ceased to surprise and baffle us. Yet we flattered ourselves that we knew something of the world and the inhabitants thereof!

In the process of acclimation we had occasion, if we had never had it before, to be thankful for the unfailing and robust sense of humor that had stood our friend in many straits which would else have been annoyances. Before long, we recognized that certain contradictory phases of conduct and language, hard to comprehend and hard to endure, had their keynote in what one of the best of my new friends once aptly defined to me as “an agony of incommunicableness,” inherent in the New-Englander’s composition. He may have drawn the strain through nearly three centuries from his early English ancestry. I have seen the same paradox in the Briton of this generation. Of one such man I said, later in life, when I was alone with my sick son, thousands of miles from home: “The ice was slow in breaking up; but it gave way all at once, and there was warm water under it.”

“Agony of incommunicableness!” Over and over, during those five years, I blessed the man who put that key into my hand.

I cannot better illustrate what I am trying to explain than by relating what is, to me, one of the most precious and altogether satisfactory memories connected with our Springfield experiences.

Four months after our removal to the beautiful city, I received a formal request (everything up to that time had a smack of formality to my apprehension) that I would take charge of a young men’s Bible-class, the teacher of which had left the town. The application was startling, for not one of the young fellows had ever called on me, or evinced other consciousness of the insignificant fact of my existence than was implied in a grave salutation at the church-door and on the street. After consultation with my husband I accepted the position, and on the next Sabbath was duly inducted into office by the superintendent. That is, he took me to the door of the class-room and announced: “Mrs. Terhune, young gentlemen, who will conduct your class in the place of Mr. L., resigned.”